Crikey, it's raw Stevo!

The rest of the world can't get enough of the Crocodile Hunter but,
in his own habitat, Steve Irwin's overcaffeinated style is
considered a bit hard to swallow. Frank Robson encounters the wild
one.

Steve Irwin pictured in 2003.Photo: Heath Missen

This story was first published in The Good
Weekend in April, 2002.

The plot of Steve "the Crocodile Hunter" Irwin's first feature
film involves him rescuing a croc from ruthless Americans who want
to retrieve a spy satellite beacon it has eaten. Or something like
that. Although filming finished months ago, Irwin says he hasn't
seen the rough cut - or even the script - and doesn't really know
"what the heck goes on". How can that be? Stevo, as he calls
himself, reckons it's because he's kept away from anything that
might tempt him to change his manic "natural" style. The style that
has made him perhaps the most famous Australian in the world.

"Years ago," explains Irwin at his zoo and home north of
Brisbane, "I started seeing things about meself in [The Crocodile
Hunter TV series] that I didn't like, and I was starting to
change." His friend John Stainton, who directs and produces the
series, warned him not to. "He said if we were gunna prosper, and
do this for the rest of our lives, I had to stay the same as I was
the first day we met." Stainton forbade him to view the shows until
they went to air, and took responsibility for all business and
media negotiations.

"That way," reasons Irwin, "I can travel through life just being
me. 'Cause, deadset, the secret of our success is just havin' raw
Stevo." Thus, when Stainton directed their first movie, Collision
Course, he unveiled the storyline to Irwin in "little bits ... and
I'd just spit my [unscripted] lines to camera". Irwin, who plays
himself in the movie, insists he can't act: "I just haven't got it
in me!" - a claim hotly disputed by his critics. Yet by any
commercial measure, raw Stevo is clearly a commodity worth
preserving.

His wildlife documentaries, now watched by hundreds of millions
in more than 130 countries, have made the ebullient, croc-wrestling
presenter a cult hero in the US, where his most avid fans are
children, students, and - strange but true - FBI agents.

Irwin's haziness over what takes place in Collision Course
doesn't inhibit his prediction that the MGM production could be
"... potentially the greatest film the world has ever seen!"

At 40, Irwin still occupies the unassuming lowset bungalow built
30 years ago in the grounds of what was then his parents' roadside
reptile park at Beerwah, on the Sunshine Coast. The much-expanded
property is now called Australia Zoo, a thriving international
tourist attraction promoted as "the home of TV's Crocodile Hunter".
Two hundred staff wearing trademark Croc Hunter khaki shorts,
shirts and bush boots man the entry booths, animal enclosures,
1,500-seat restaurant, and a souvenir shop packed with Croc Hunter
merchandise. This includes talking dolls depicting Irwin and his
Canadian-born wife and co-presenter, Terri, and "Bindi-wear", a
range of clothing named for their young daughter, Bindi Sui
(herself named after a crocodile from Babinda, and Irwin's dog,
Sui) who recently made a CD and video with The Wiggles.

When we meet, Irwin, Terri and Bindi, all wearing khaki, are
sitting around a long table in their lounge room, where crocodile
and fish skulls vie for space with toys and books. Irwin's chubby
face glows when he likens their lives in recent years to "a great
big dream ... you wake up in the morning and you're like,
'Whoo-hoo!' You just can't wait to get into it!"

He points out, though, that it's not fame itself he enjoys - not
being mobbed in US streets, or appearing on national talk shows, or
being spoofed on South Park and Sesame Street, or the adulation of
countless khaki-clad American kids who rush about crying "Crikey!"
and "What a liddle bewdy!"; not even his naming by former US
powerbroker Newt Gingrich as having "significantly impacted on
American culture". No, he says, it's the platform fame provides for
promoting wildlife conservation - "and ultimately to help save the
world ... that is our gift, our destiny, our passion."

Irwin's "passion" for this theme is outstripped only by the
intensity of his feelings for his parents: Bob, a plumber turned
herpetologist, and Lyn, a nurse and wildlife rehabilitator who died
in a car accident two years ago. Irwin says his love of wildlife
began in infancy when his family lived at Upper Ferntree Gully in
Victoria's Dandenong Ranges, an area "surrounded" by dangerous
snakes.

He went on snake-catching trips with his father, who detected in
young Steve some sort of "animal instinct" that gave him an uncanny
skill for finding and handling dangerous creatures (a quality
Irwin's documentary crew reverently call "The Force").

In 1970, Bob and Lyn brought their son and two daughters to
Queensland and set up the Beerwah Reptile Park. "Right here!" cries
Irwin, pacing the room. "Here is the house that I grew up in! That
was my room, right there. This is the room where Mum nursed sick
animals ... If we lost one, we'd sit together on the floor right
here!" The pungency of Irwin's memories is engaging but a bit
unsettling, as though a large part of him still occupies the
vibrant world he describes. (Accuracy is another thing: his older
sister, Joy Muscillo, tells me later that the family left the
Ferntree Gully house and moved to Essendon before Steve was
born.)

"All I ever wanted to do was be my dad!" Irwin says, as he has
many times before. "He was the greatest herpetologist ever, and our
snake trips - when I followed his big long footsteps, mimicking
him, wanting to make him proud of me - that hadda be the highlight
of my life!" In an autobiography revised last year, Irwin added a
tortured dedication to his mother: Oh gosh! I miss you, Mum ... the
pain of losing you tears my heart out. But I'll stay strong. I
promise you I'll stay strong - for it was you who taught me to be a
'Wildlife Warrior'...

By the age of 10, Irwin was already an "adrenaline junkie" who
scaled trees like a monkey and leapt from his father's boat onto
the backs of small crocodiles which were being relocated as part of
a state government management program. He was 24 - and still
"trying to find out about sheilas" - when he experienced his first
prolonged absence from home: an 18-month overseas holiday during
which, he says, he wrote to his parents every day. "I'm sure my mum
would have kept those letters somewhere," he adds, then looks away,
his eyes wet.

"No, no, no," he says at my apology, "it's just, it's gunna be
her birthday in a couple of days. And I was born on her birthday,
and mate, it's just killin' me. It's just absolutely killin'
me."

When he finally left his parents in the mid-1980s, it was to
disappear into the wilds of north Queensland on a mission that led
directly to his role as the Crocodile Hunter. With only his dog for
company, he spent five years catching and relocating protected
saltwater crocodiles that had become a threat to people in remote
communities. (A hundred or so of those deemed most dangerous were
transported to his father's park, where they now entertain visitors
to Australia Zoo, appear in Irwin's documentaries, and occasionally
bite staff.)

Irwin's feats of bushmanship and endurance during that time were
astonishing. For months on end he lived like Tarzan, capturing
enraged crocodiles with only net-traps and a small aluminium
dinghy. "Mate," he whoops, "I was totally feral! I could run a wild
pig down." The setting of each trap meant hauling a 120-kilo
weight-bag high into the mangroves "while 5,000 green ants were
biting on my eyeballs ... [later] I hadda get the croc into the
boat, then from the boat to me truck, then into a crate. No-one
could believe one person could do that, so Dad sent me up this
video camera."

With the camera tied to a tree, or on the boat seat, Irwin
recorded his horrifying ordeals. Every so often his grinning,
mud-caked face would pop up before the lens. "Didja see that!" he'd
holler, bug-eyed, before rushing off to deal with the next crisis.
It was during one of his visits home to Beerwah, where he dodged
lunging crocs in demonstrations for tourists, that Irwin met his
future wife, Terri Raines.

"I looked up," he says, "and here's this beautiful sheila
watching me from the crowd. And we fell in love and that was it: my
whole world ended." When Terri laughs, Irwin corrects himself:
"Well, I should say 'changed'."

Raised in Oregon, where she ran a wildlife rehabilitation park,
Terri says she was mesmerised by what Irwin told her and the other
tourists of his wilderness adventures. "He spoke with such passion
and enthusiasm of how crocodiles were such wonderful mothers, and
very passionate, involved lovers ... I thought, 'This is the most
amazing man I've ever seen. He's like Tarzan, Indiana Jones and
Crocodile Dundee all wrapped into one!'"

It turned out that Terri, too, had "only ever wanted to be my
dad" - an ex-policeman and World War II pilot who was the "biggest,
strongest, bravest man" she knew. Until then. And when Irwin showed
her around the park, where she struck her head on a beam in an
enclosure but didn't complain, Stevo was equally smitten. "I
thought, 'Crikey, a sheila who loves wildlife and can take a good
hit on the head, that's the woman for me!'" They were married in
Oregon in 1992; soon afterwards, Irwin's parents left the zoo and
moved to Bundaberg.

By then, Irwin and John Stainton had agreed to make a series of
documentaries about his croc catching, the first of which was
filmed while the newlyweds were honeymooning on the Burdekin River
in north Queensland. "We were in the mangroves with a four-person
film crew," says Terri, "so it was hard to get any privacy. We'd
[escape] up some tributary in the dinghy, and go, 'This is
romantic, but let's hope the boat doesn't tip over because there's
a crocodile right there' ... Believe me, I had mosquito bites where
no mosquito has gone before!"

Three years ago, when daughter Bindi was born, Stainton and crew
were again on hand. "I kept 'em up the head of the bed," says
Irwin, "while I did the hard bit: you know, popping the head out
and everything." Even then, the versatile Crocodile Hunter raved to
the camera, "Crikey! Have a look at this little beauty!"

As co-presenter of The Crocodile Hunter, the business-savvy
Terri (who managed her family's construction business at the age of
20) plays the admiring straight woman - "Be careful, Steve!" - to
Irwin's fearless daredevil. She maintains the role for journalists,
singing her husband's praises in a way that Irwin can't, because,
as he says, "... Australians find it arrogant." In one startling
routine, Terri tells how Irwin went surfing at a local beach with
former world surfing champion Kelly Slater, who he met during a
talk-show appearance.

"And Kelly told Steve, 'You surf as good as any of the
professionals.'" Terri points out that this is because "whatever
Steve is passionate about, he's absolutely the best at. And I'm
lucky, because ... [pause]"

The film-maker Irwin calls "a deadset genius" is a slight man of
about 50 with an odd mop of frizzy red-grey hair. John Stainton and
Irwin met in the late '80s, when Stainton used animals from the
reptile park in his shoots for TV commercials. In 1990, after
sitting up all night watching and rewatching one of the raw videos
Irwin made of himself catching crocodiles, Stainton was still too
excited to sleep.

"Steve's talent and enthusiasm just bubbled out at you," he says
in his Brisbane office.

When they began filming The Crocodile Hunter, Stainton followed
the close-up-and-dangerous format Irwin had unknowingly developed:
"I wanted the audience to feel it was Steve's own movie. We use
wide-angle rather than zoom lens, and to this day we haven't used a
tripod. The impression is that there are three people on the
expeditions: Steve, Terri and the camera."

But from the time the series first appeared on the Ten Network,
Australians didn't warm to Irwin's hyperbolic style. And despite
their rationalisations about the US and Europe being where the real
money is, Irwin and Stainton can't disguise their irritation over
this. "Australians don't know how to watch Steve," says Stainton.
"[Some] might be embarrassed by him, or think he's too ocker ...
but the show was made for a mass audience, and we make no apologies
for that." (Irwin takes the line that his relative anonymity here
is a blessing because it preserves his privacy.)

There's no doubt that many Australians experience a collective
cringe over Irwin's showman-like antics. Unlike Americans, they're
put off by his impassioned testaments to his own sincerity, the
preachy tone of his "saving the world" pitch, and his hair-trigger,
often comical sentimentality. "Australians

But according to Michael Stedman, who heads New Zealand Natural
History, one of the world's largest producers of wildlife
documentaries, most of Irwin's detractors are either jealous or
snobs. "He's moved wildlife out of some sort of religious
experience and into the entertainment industry," says Stedman. "Is
he sort of half-mad? Absolutely. Is he a zealot, a showman? Yes.
But ... I think he's probably done more for the environment than a
lot of the voice-of-God documentaries that have screened for
generations."

Irwin is a big hit in NZ, and Stedman gleefully suggests that he
embarrasses Australians by personifying the traits they don't want
to be known for. "I think it's a bizarre reaction - a bit like a
woman liking to see the child in the man, but not liking others to
see the child."

Irwin's US breakthrough came when cable television's Discovery
Channel launched a new network, Animal Planet. When it bought the
first 10 episodes of The Crocodile Hunter in 1996, the network had
just 200,000 subscribers. A year later, there were seven million;
now, it's 76 million. "The network will tell you that 70 million of
those are there because of The Crocodile Hunter," says Stainton. By
the late 1990s, "the croc guy" - still almost unheard of here - was
one of North America's hottest stars.

Families without cable TV crowded into neighbours' homes to
watch his show; nightclub comics imitated the famous Irwin "action
crouch"; college students devised a game in which bar patrons scull
their drinks every time Irwin says "Crikey!" or "Isn't she a
beauty?"; South Park created an Irwin character who says things
like, "I'm going to sneak up on that croc and jam my thumb in its
butthole!"; and The New York Times introduced a glossary explaining
Irwin's ocker phrases.

None of this seems to have had much effect on raw Stevo, who
still goes to bed by 8.30 pm and rises at 4 am to go surfing or
work around the zoo. "He doesn't get off on hotels and limos and
jets," says Stainton. "He doesn't drink, smoke or use coffee.
Outside work, and his family, surfing is his only pleasure."

Stainton's Best Picture Show Company has made 53 one-hour
episodes of The Crocodile Hunter and various spin-off programs. The
main series has Steve and Terri confronting wildlife

of various kinds all over the world, but it's crocs and snakes -
as the Steve Irwin doll says, "Danger! Danger! Danger!" - that
audiences like best. Through all of this, notes Stainton, his
business relationship with Irwin has been based solely on trust, a
situation that confounds the industry's more hard-nosed
operators.

Stainton isn't keen to discuss details of what he calls their
"arrangement made in heaven", but seems unconcerned by any thought
of his star being lured away. "I have absolute faith in him. I know
he would put his life on the line for me." (Irwin, likewise, says
he's had offers from "the biggest players in the world", but would
never work with anyone but Stainton: "He's like my brother...")

Stainton dismisses speculation that he and the Irwins are
already multi-millionaires, saying the returns from cable TV are
notoriously small. "We thought going into merchandising might pull
the bigger money in, but we're flat-out seeing much money out of
that, either." Yet the Irwins are engaged in a $40 million
expansion to Australia Zoo, funded by their family company and a
bank loan. This is apparently seen to accord with Irwin's
oft-repeated claim that he doesn't "profit" from animals, and that
everything he earns is returned to conservation causes. Stainton
points out that Irwin is also buying tracts of remote land that
will be left untouched as wildlife havens.

As the famous Irwins leave their bungalow for a photo session,
they're enveloped by a khaki army of staff and security guards. The
procession marches briskly to the enclosure of a crocodile named
Graham, notorious for having bitten Irwin on the arm in 1992, and
for a more serious attack a year ago on Irwin's friend Wes Mannion,
the zoo's managing director. "I thought I was gone," says Mannion,
31, raising his shorts leg to show the livid scars left by Graham's
teeth.

"It was late at night, and Steve and I were in the enclosure
trying to clear storm debris from the fences. We took our eyes off
Graham for a bit too long, and he came up behind me in waist-deep
water and just drilled me into the fence." The 3.5-metre croc's
jaws pinned Mannion from the back of the knee to the hip. "Luckily,
he'd grabbed all meat, and when I twisted with all my might [the
flesh] ripped clean out ... He was about to grab me on the head
when Steve leapt on his tail and hung on.

I jumped out of the water onto the fence, and I could see Steve
jamming a stick into Graham's mouth. I yelled, 'I'm clear!', and
Steve's gone, 'You beauty!', and he jumped out, too."

Mannion needed 150 stitches and staples, and was hospitalised
for 12 days. He says the attack left holes in his thigh big enough
to put a fist in. What happened to the, uh, bits? "Graham ate
them," says Mannion. "But he had every right to attack. He was
protecting his mate from invaders." Mannion has worked at the
property for 16 years and hero-worships the Irwins. "It almost
makes me cry when Steve's father Bob visits the zoo," he tells me,
"because he's just so proud of what Steve has done. And I think his
approval means more to Steve than practically anything."

Irwin has taken a number of "minor hits" from crocs and
non-venomous snakes, and often jokes to tourists about how certain
crocs are always trying to eat him for having captured them. But
any mention of people eating crocs, or crocodile farming, makes him
as cranky as a nesting taipan. "I loathe it, disgust it, and am
totally appalled," he growls of the numerous Australian farms where
tourists can sample crocodile meat. "People say it's cool to eat
crocs and kangaroos. But, geez, we're the only nation in the world
that would eat our national anthem..."

Terri: "Our coat of arms."

Irwin: "Do you think Americans would sit down and eat bald
eagle? I'm here to tell you it's not right! It's embarrassing for
Australia that we eat our own wildlife." And so on. At the
suggestion that these are subjective views, and that farming is
farming, Irwin makes a startling speech. "Here is my greatest gift
to the world," he cries. "We need to stand proud of what is
Australia ... the greatest grazing nation on the face of the Earth!
The whole joint is grazing land ... and by crikey we're good at it!
We should be ... [eating] beef and lamb, not kangaroos and
crocodiles. They're why [tourists] come to Australia. They are
tourism icons!"

But what about our history of overgrazing, salinity,
erosion?

The Wildlife Warrior waves this aside. "Cows have been on our
land for so long that Australia has evolved to handle those big
animals," he says vaguely. It's a confusing perspective, but the
message seems to be that eating roos and crocs is bad for tourism,
and more cruel than eating other animals. Terri, who lectures on
tourism marketing and promotion at a local campus, is especially
vocal on the theme. ("Steve helped build our new 1,500-seat
restaurant," she has told me earlier. "My job is to fill it.")

In early episodes of The Crocodile Hunter, conservation themes
were barely evident.

That changed dramatically after the program took off on the
Animal Planet network, when the Irwins' "mission" to "save the
planet" became a permanent sub-plot.

A couple of years ago, Irwin used his Web site to mount a
furious "Millennium Resolution" attack on croc farming, and other
forms of so-called sustainable-use wildlife management. "The time
has come for me to expose the current 'Hitlers of wildlife',"

he proclaimed. "My dad and God have prepared me for the immense
personal attacks I am about to receive [as a consequence]."

But there were no attacks, and little or no public response.
Keith Cook, proprietor of the Cairns Crocodile Farm, says Irwin's
broadside was too silly to bother with: "All it meant, in my eyes,
was that he'd gone from a harmless buffoon to some sort of
religious crusader, [whose] show has become a means of preaching to
the gullible." Cook points to a long history of "strange egomania"
among Australians associated with crocodiles, who he says become
obsessed with a need for attention. "They're prepared to do the
stupidest things, in terms of safety, and make outlandish claims,
and vilify others, because they feel their territory is being
intruded upon."

And yet, as the devoted managing director of Irwin's zoo, Wes
Mannion, points out, young people these days need to be excited
before they'll watch anything. And love him or hate him, raw Stevo
is excitement on the hoof. "He is compulsive," says Michael
Stedman. "The moment that face appears on the screen looking
slightly mad, you think, 'Jesus, what now?' And then you think,
'F..., one day you're gunna die!'"

Talented, perplexing, a mix of carnival huckster, New Age
crusader and little boy lost, Steve Irwin manages to be both an
open book and, at some deeper level, a closely guarded mystery.

SPONSORED LINKS

1157222053963-smh.com.auhttp://www.smh.com.au/news/national/crikey-its-raw-stevo/2006/09/04/1157222053963.htmlsmh.com.auSydney Morning Herald2006-09-04Crikey, it's raw Stevo!Frank RobsonThe rest of the world can't get enough of the Crocodile Hunter but,
in his own habitat, Steve Irwin's overcaffeinated style is
considered a bit hard to swallow. Frank Robson encounters the wild
one.Nationalhttp://www.smh.com.au/ffximage/2006/09/04/irwin1_narrowweb__300x458,0.jpg